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August 31, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 3
actively calling for Germany to take the reins of power. Most recently Maas laid out a detailed blueprint in a Handelsblatt article and he was shockingly blunt.
“The fact that the Atlantic has widened politi- cally is by no means solely due to Donald Trump. The US and Europe have been drifting apart for years. The overlapping of values and interests that shaped our relationship for two generations is decreasing. The binding force of the East-West conflict is history,” he wrote.
The crisis in Ukraine is a good example of the growing divergence between Washington and Brussels. Europeans were annoyed by US top dip- lomat Victoria Nuland, who walked into Ukraine during the Euromaidan protests and took over. “Fuck the EU,” she famously said in a leaked con- versation with US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt dis- cussing how to build a new pro-US government.
Ukraine is the EU’s backyard but US policy was
a cynical attempt to push its own interests in the region. Leaked US embassy cables called former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych “a man we can do business with” before the revolution, as Washington manoeuvred to limit Putin’s attempt to get Ukraine to join his newly minted Customs Un- ion. Nuland later openly picked jobs for Ukrainian opposition leaders, while Europe became increas- ingly uncomfortable with the American belief that as “the steward of the planet,” as Nuland said in Kyiv in 2014, it could ignore Brussels and Berlin.
“If you look around the world at who’s made the largest financial and political contribution to this challenge, the United States, I think, is second to none... Are we, as stewards of this planet, going to support the right of individuals to have a say in how they are governed, to live democratically, to live openly, to live in tolerance,” Nuland said during a panel discussion on Ukraine’s East and Crimea: Solving the Unsolvable in Kyiv in 2015.
Post Euromaidan, after Yanukovych was ousted, the Europeans reasserted themselves. Then Ger-
man foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier together with President of the European Council Donald Tusk was at a crucial meeting where the top European diplomats persuaded the opposi- tion protest leaders to call for early elections and leave Yanukovych in office in the meantime. bne IntelliNews sources at the meeting described Tusk shouting at the Ukrainian politicians, warn- ing them there would be blood on the street un- less they managed the transition democratically. As it was the decision came to nothing as the crowds on Maidan chased Yanukovych out of the country within a few days. The Americans played little role in these dramatic events. The peace accords of Minsk II were also a European deal ne- gotiated between Merkel, France’s then president François Hollande and Putin. The US got back into the game again later when US Secretary of State John Kerry asserted himself, but ever since then pursuing a conclusion to the Ukrainian debacle has been a Merkel project.
Iran row
Trump’s ham-fistedness has led the EU to be- come increasingly assertive in its foreign policy clashes with Washington. A more recent run-in was over the US decision to reimpose a tough sanctions regime on Iran despite the fact it was fully complying with the terms of the delicately crafted deal agreed in 2015 between Iran and the permanent members of the UN security council, plus Germany.
The agreement was hailed as a diplomatic tri- umph and more importantly it was working, as inspectors say Iran had completely dismantled its nuclear bomb building research apparatus. More- over, the deal opened the way for businesses to enter Iran, and European companies have already signed off on a string of lucrative agreements.
Trump threw the deal under the bus reportedly at Israel’s behest. In a leaked video clip aired in July by Israeli television, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted that Israel was responsible for Trump’s decision to quit the Iran nuclear deal.